Yeah, but their opinion would change if the bots became as challenging and interesting to play against as human opponents.

I really doubt it. You see the best part about playing online is playing with and against actual people. Do you really think all those guys tossing trash talk around are just in it for the challenge? No they also want to be able to shoot the shit with random guys.

Plus you will never create bots that are anywhere near the level of actual players. They will always be far to predictable. This is because they can only use preexisting strategies. Sure they can be programmed to switch strategies much like the chess supercomputers you talked about but again its still predictable.

Can we inject a note of realism into this? We need only compare Sandy Bridge gaming performance to Sandy Bridge-E to see that modern games do NOT benefit from massive core counts, and a PowerPC architecture is unlikely given that MS have already shown interest in unifying the PC and Xbox in the past and can't do so if the Xbox isn't x64.

It's funny how people call this so very outlandish, while it isn't really, in terms of tech. I mean sure, it's probably still not true because it'd be too expensive, but it's not that impossible. Pointless, yes, but not impossible.

Still, I don't care much about all this horsepower if the rumours about it needing to be online at all times are true. That'd be an instantly lost sale for me.

There's no point in having a 16-core processor if they're not powerful individual cores. 16 weak cores is great for smart AI bots and things like that, but not very good for general gameplay. If they are actually powerful, then this thing would cost like $1500, so that's obviously not possible.

This rumor is likely not true. There isn't much point in having more than 8ish cores right now.

The difference is desktop PC's have out of order processors whereas consoles are entirely in-order processors. I'll let wiki say it for me. Essentially, in an out of order processor "the processor can avoid being idle while data is retrieved for the next instruction in a program, processing instead the next instructions which is able to run immediately."

While that may be true of Xenon, I would be highly surprised if we don't see a heavily pipelined, out-of-order, branch predicting processor. The features are so common today, even in $1 microcontrollers, that it would be embarrassing not to. The main issue is heat generation; the reason the 360 didn't do OoO was that they couldn't sink the heat fast enough to run the whole processor all the time. Nowadays I would think an OoO processor with a lower clock would meet their performance requirements and be cheaper to produce than a high-frequency, in-order processor. Anyway, if any consoles come out with any architecture other than PowerPC, they definitely will, because the whole reason heat is an issue - and the reason Apple ditched it - is that PowerPC has hit its thermal performance limit.

CPU and GPU isn't the true problem of current consoles (even now those are decent)It is the tiny RAMI prefer big, open world games (like TES) and those are RAM demandingIf we ever hope to see Elder Scrolls game without interior/exterior cells, we need at least 8Gb RAM on next consoles

Da Orky Man:They took their time, but the PC Master Race has deigned to speak to us lowly console mortals.

He hasn't said anything about PCs, he's talking completely about the stuff consoles are made of. This happens to be a a thread about technology, using words such as "transistor" doesn't mean he's speaking down to you.

I'm a PC gamer predominantly, but I also have a PS3. I have an interest in hardware.

If you look at the jist of my post, you'll see that i'm simply asking questions about what Durango is going to be like and questioning all this speculation. Plus, I might also be trying to dampen the predicted "ZOMG ITS SO POWERFUL" tirade from a portion of the population by reminding everyone of the facts about the 7 series.

We're not even thinking of 16 core CPUs for hardcore gaming PCs. AMD have only just released an 8 core CPU which is still a hefty amount. A Radeon HD 7000 equivalent seems a little far fetched as well having seen how far they can push what's in the current xbox's card.

Either this thing's gonna cost a bomb or I'm underestimating Microsoft.

The difference is desktop PC's have out of order processors whereas consoles are entirely in-order processors. I'll let wiki say it for me. Essentially, in an out of order processor "the processor can avoid being idle while data is retrieved for the next instruction in a program, processing instead the next instructions which is able to run immediately."

You mind if you source that? Last time I checked, OOP was something pretty standard across most processing archs, including ARM.

blackrave:CPU and GPU isn't the true problem of current consoles (even now those are decent)It is the tiny RAMI prefer big, open world games (like TES) and those are RAM demandingIf we ever hope to see Elder Scrolls game without interior/exterior cells, we need at least 8Gb RAM on next consoles

You're thinking in PC terms that executes:

1 - A full fledged OS2 - No compressible memory management algorithms what so ever

Take a look at Skyrim on PC. It will typically use 2GB of RAM, however there are things you can do to increase RAM usage for the sake of MOAR STUFF ON SCREEEEEEEN. Couple in Windows and some background processes, and you've not even broken 4GB. On console with a lightweight OS (no more than 100MB RAM usage) and the aggressive memory management algorithms put into the game code (the reason ports take so long outside compiler differences), and you'll see 2GB on a PC go down to 750MB to 1GB on console.

Also remember the main aim of a console (something Sony missed with the PS3 that ended up costing them this generation) is to provide a platform that treads a balanced line between potency and affordability. 8GB of RAM is about £35 for baseline speeds. 2GB at same baseline speeds is under £10. That's £25 saved for every console made. I could go on, but I'm tired, and hope you get the basic point.

Griffolion:If you look at the jist of my post, you'll see that i'm simply asking questions about what Durango is going to be like and questioning all this speculation

Most of it doesn't even qualify as speculation... Spazzing out is more the term I'd use.

8GB of RAM is about £35 for baseline speeds. 2GB at same baseline speeds is under £10. That's £25 saved for every console made.

The savings are even more when you consider that consoles often use the more expensive memory types designed for RISC based workstation/server systems rather than the kit you'd see inside a desktop PC.

blackrave:CPU and GPU isn't the true problem of current consoles (even now those are decent)It is the tiny RAMI prefer big, open world games (like TES) and those are RAM demandingIf we ever hope to see Elder Scrolls game without interior/exterior cells, we need at least 8Gb RAM on next consoles

You're thinking in PC terms that executes:

1 - A full fledged OS2 - No compressible memory management algorithms what so ever

Take a look at Skyrim on PC. It will typically use 2GB of RAM, however there are things you can do to increase RAM usage for the sake of MOAR STUFF ON SCREEEEEEEN. Couple in Windows and some background processes, and you've not even broken 4GB. On console with a lightweight OS (no more than 100MB RAM usage) and the aggressive memory management algorithms put into the game code (the reason ports take so long outside compiler differences), and you'll see 2GB on a PC go down to 750MB to 1GB on console.

Also remember the main aim of a console (something Sony missed with the PS3 that ended up costing them this generation) is to provide a platform that treads a balanced line between potency and affordability. 8GB of RAM is about £35 for baseline speeds. 2GB at same baseline speeds is under £10. That's £25 saved for every console made. I could go on, but I'm tired, and hope you get the basic point.

Sad thing is that consoles don't have even 1Gb RAMIt's under 500MbSo yeah 8Gb would be perfect, but expensive, so unlikelyBut 4Gb would be achievableWhat console developers did wrong was took more expensive faster RAM, instead of little slower, but cheaper RAM. They could keep same price, but have more MB for RAM.But again it depends on the games you plan run on console.Intense games (like GoW or CoD) runs better with faster RAMBig games (like TES or Minecraft) runs better on bigger RAMSo yeah, priorities

Also remember the main aim of a console (something Sony missed with the PS3 that ended up costing them this generation) is to provide a platform that treads a balanced line between potency and affordability. 8GB of RAM is about £35 for baseline speeds. 2GB at same baseline speeds is under £10. That's £25 saved for every console made. I could go on, but I'm tired, and hope you get the basic point.

I figured Sony was fixated on getting Bluray to be the standard media disk in order to safely profit from movie sales, it was so important that they sold the system at heavy loss.

I hear their early backwards compatibility screwed them quite a bit on cost though. I appreciated the feature but it probably would have boosted their initial sales had they of dropped it and lowered the price somewhat.

Congrats people! Die-hard console fans will finally have a piece of hardware vastly better than any PC gamer!

Granted, it'll cost you (likely) more than $8000 USD, but hey. At least you can say it's faster and more powerful than any PC gamers rig, right?

Or maybe...just maybe...this is yet another bit of bullshit rumor that deserves to be ignored. Seriously people, the console crowd has been trolled harder in the past month or so than the Half-Life fans have been for the past four years. We really need to stop giving credence to this stuff.

I'm doubting even the dev-builds of the new consoles have that many cores. It's just excessive to the point of being ludicrous.

The highways on a motherboard only have so much bandwidth... so... 16 cores won't necessarily equate to four times the performance if the HDD/SSD and the RAM and the GPU can't keep pace. Then there's the actual games and how well they're optimized to take advantage of it.

This speculation is ridiculous. I doubt the next xbox will be any more then twice the raw power of the current xbox, CPU wise.